It has been a shamefully long time since I've updated this blog. It has been hard to find words that seemed good enough to be a tribute to a woman like Shirl.
However, it has now been a year since she passed, and my mum and I were talking about her the other night. There is just so much to say about Shirl, it seems a crime not to say it.
There are people in the world who expect everything given to them on a plate, who don't care about anybody else, and who don't aspire to be or do anything. I think the most fitting word I can use to describe Shirl- and it may be the biggest compliment you can give a person- is that she was so significant. Not just to me, and not just to to my family, but to everything and everybody around her.
I'm not going to say that Shirl was Mother Theresa, she had her flaws, as any human does. But the good in her was that she possessed some of the best traits you could want in a person. Generous to a fault, high-spirited, hard-working and saw everything with a good sense of humour.
It's these very traits that made her passing so sad. I would never go so far as to say anybody would deserve any kind of cancer. People deserve to go to prison for committing a crime, to lose their job for malpractice, or to have their infidelity discovered. Nobody deserves a terminal illness. However, it just seemed doubly unfair that Shirl, a good person with a beautiful soul, who never smoked or drank, a woman who quite literally found her vocation in life improving other peoples' health and wellbeing, was destined for something as cold and cruel as Mesothelioma- a rare form of cancer- on her lungs.
At work, I was lucky enough to meet Richard Parks before he set out to complete his 737 Challenge in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care . He commented quite correctly that almost the worst thing about cancer is that it is often blind. There are people who smoke, who know deep down, that carrying on their habit will almost certainly have a detrimental effect on their health, with "The Big C" a constant dark cloud over their heads. There are people who drink to excess, and force irreparable damage onto their livers and brains, not to mention the people around them. Then there are people who absolutely never did anything to warrant such a fate, but somehow end their lives in a cancer care unit.
I said at the beginning that I wouldn't harass people for donations, but now I'm going to. The reason I'm going to is because cancer might be blind, but we are not. I think most of us know someone who has or has had suffered from it, and it's the hardest thing to watch a person go through, all the while just sitting beside them and knowing how unfair it is. The smallest of donations can be part of something enormous, so please do take a couple of minutes to donate.
Thanks,
Charley
